A CDC official was asked why the CDC lists COVID as a vaccine-preventable disease if vaccinated people can still both be infected and transmit COVID.Public health officials from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) admitted that people vaccinated with the COVID-19 vaccine can still get COVID and can transmit COVID at a Feb. 15 congressional hearing.
At the hearing by the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) asked if the vaccine prevented people from transmitting the virus.
“There’s data that shows that earlier in the pandemic there was some reduction in transmission. The data on that are very challenging to pin down. It does not absolutely prevent transmission,” said Dr. Peter Marks, one of the hearing witnesses and the director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research at the FDA.
Mr. Cloud also asked if vaccinated individuals could get COVID.
“[The COVID-19 vaccines] do a very good job of preventing death and hospitalization. They may not prevent infection,” said Dr. Marks.
Dr. Daniel Jernigan, director of CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, also agreed after Mr. Cloud repeated the question a few times. Mr. Cloud then asked Dr. Jernigan why the CDC lists COVID as a vaccine-preventable disease if vaccinated people can still both be infected and transmit COVID.
No Pharmaceutical Is Fully Safe or Effective: Witnesses
The three witnesses, Drs. Marks, Jernigan, and George Reed Grimes, who is the director of the division of injury compensation programs at the Health Resources and Services Administration, affirmed that no pharmaceutical could be a hundred percent safe and effective.
While Dr. Marks stated in his opening statement that the COVID vaccine is safe and effective, Dr. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), chairman of the subcommittee, reiterated that they needed to be careful with wording.
Every VAERS Report Is Followed Up On?
“COVID vaccines are the most closely monitored vaccines that have ever been rolled out in U.S. history,” Dr. Jernigan said. He listed five systems that are tracking COVID-19 vaccine safety data.
The first of which is the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, more commonly known as VAERS. Since anyone can make a report on the symptoms that they attribute to a vaccine, the database is used to identify trends and signals of potential adverse events.
Dr. Jernigan said that every serious adverse event report is followed up on to ensure that the adverse event is indeed linked to the vaccine.
However, Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.), during her five minutes for questioning, gave an example of a former constituent who was diagnosed as having Guillain Barre syndrome from his COVID vaccination, but two years later, has not yet received any response from VAERS nor CICP. She also mentioned a case in New York where a family is struggling to update the status of a VAERS ID from hospitalized to deceased on the database.
“VAERS is a system for getting information in and quickly identifying trends, but it is not a dataset that we use to determine causality or the impact of the vaccine,” Dr. Jernigan said.
However, he did not say which dataset is used to determine causality.
The other four databases are Vaccine Safety Datalink, a large database of 13.5 million health records; a pregnancy monitoring system; a smartphone-based app called VSafe; and a clinician immunization safety assessment program.
Dr. Grimes, the third witness of the hearing, said in his opening statement that vaccine adverse events made up less than 0.01 percent of all vaccinations, and the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP) has seen a magnitude increase in compensation claims after 2020.
The CICP was established in 2010, and as of Jan. 1, there have been 13,406 CICP claims filed, of which 12,854 claims are made for COVID-19 vaccines.
CICP differs from the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) because the COVID-19 vaccines were purchased and distributed by the federal government under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act.
Most vaccine injuries are compensated under the VICP, which compensates people through a compensation trust fund rather than taxpayer money.
COVID vaccine injured people cannot get compensated using VICP.
Currently, 11 people have been compensated.
Dr. Grimes said that since he was made director of the injury compensation program in 2021, he has had to increase the staff evaluating compensation claims from four to 35.
Currently, around 2,000 of these claims have been processed, with around 90 cases evaluated every month. So far, 40 cases have been linked to vaccination.
Rep. Dr. Rich McCormick (R-Ga.) said that it would take 10 years before all of the current backlog can be evaluated.
